


The Winds To Nova Zembla

by orphan_account



Category: Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials
Genre: F/M, Yuletide 2004
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-12-24
Updated: 2004-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-13 07:37:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/134693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The passion of witches is unavoidable, especially for the witch. Serafina Pekkala and Lee Scoresby, the morning post-witch council, and what happened after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Winds To Nova Zembla

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Roz McClure](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Roz+McClure).



> Written for: Roz McClure in the Yuletide 2004 Challenge

In some Tartar tribes, they'd said that the bodies of heroes were greater in death. She did not know. She had never seen a hero's death, and she had never died. She had picked her way through smoke and air and flame, hot with the stench of burnt men, the fire from the naptha and the zeppelin a crackling, sullen sheet in the gully below. The hot pitch had eaten at the forests, and torched the dry wood; the blackened scrub lay among the skeleton of the zeppelin and the cooling corpses, the hot sun white on the limestone cliffs. It was ugly, ugly, misshapen, infertile. Serafina Pekkala loved the icy crunch of sand, and the desert moon painting her hair, and the smell of water in the breaks of dunes; she loved the world, but she could find no love for this place.

Lee Scoresby looked taller in death, for a short-life, for a man, locked behind a bullet-pitted boulder with his rifle by his side like an honour-guard. He was caked with blood, dripping with blood, blooming with it; there was her red saxifrage, uselessly tumbled to the ground, a promise she had never kept. She had come with an arrow already nocked in her bow, but every single man there was dead; including him, and the stillness of it had shot her through as surely as his bullets when she came through the window between worlds. She had known, bare feet pressed to the rough pine-bark, wind biting her eyes so sharply she felt as if they might bleed; she had arched back her neck and screamed all her rage and frustration and despair to the world as if a witch-queen's anger would save him.

"I'm here, Mr. Scoresby, to answer your call," she said, "and I am too late."

 _You were proud and you begged me, and I never came._

The breeze was hot from the fire, from the burning of the bodies of the dead Muscovites, and it pushed her fair hair into her face and filled her lungs with death-smell; and suddenly she brought her hands up to her eyes and wept for him, and felt like the young witch Juta Kamainen.

* * *

It had been the cool flicker of morning after the Council when she came to him, streaked pink, to the corner of the cave that he had marked out for himself and Hester; though he was her guest, none of the witches cared to sleep too close. They were indifferent. He was too old for the young ones; and the elders thought him too unfavoured to bother with. She wondered at that, almost; he was late into his forties, but she liked the look of him, raw and long-boned. He looked like he had been torn from hard earth.

Her snow-goose dæmon, Kaisa, kept silence behind her; she left her in the cool shadows of the forest, and went to see the aëronaut. He was finishing the repairs to his basket, hands red from the rough oisiers of it, and he straightened as she came. Hester's ears pricked, sitting on a rough bit of blanket nearby, lean and hungry as only a jackrabbit could look. They flattened again as Serafina's silk-bound feet brushed the sandy floor of the cave.  
"Ma'am," Lee said. "My apologies, but I ain't ready to leave just yet."

"Peace, Mr. Scoresby," - and she settled herself down on a rock, like it was a throne; he wiped his hands from the oil on the basket and cocked his head like a bird. "We leave in the evening. We haven't finished our own preparations, and won't until it's dark. We fly by night, and so will you."

"You don't mind me having my breakfast?" It was all of a pot of coffee boiled to near-sludge, with his dæmon watching it thicken and unfeelingly let it, and a tin plate of boiled beans; he wanted retirement badly, now, the chance to grow fat on bacon and eggs and grits with butter. He turned away from her eyes to stir them; he knew better than to ask why the witch-queen was there, or if she wanted any of it. Serafina shook her head; so he left the basket and took the tin bowl in a cloth, and leant against the wall and ate. "Then I'll excuse myself, and have it."

She arranged her pale hands in her lap like butterflies, and watched him almost like a cat. He saw - and tried to be unseeing - the scarlet petals in her hair, the night's leavings from her crown; he saw the way the black silk fell on her skin, and her moon-pale hair on her shoulders, and knew why all the Texan priests had spoke against witches. Lee was suddenly, desperately uncomfortable, and Hester's golden eyes opened wide in aggravated sympathy. He finished his food and wiped his hand across his mouth, feeling mortal, and took his tin mug so that his damn mouth would have something to do. Serafina was still silent, beautiful, waiting; so he spoke, and cursed the mug to hell.

"If you've got a question, ma'am, you're more'n welcome to ask."

"I have many questions," she said, "and they don't matter, so I won't ask them. I know that you come from New Denmark in the country of Texas, and I know that you love the air and Lyra, and I know that you are a good man."

"I'm not, begging your pardon," said the aëronaut, "a good man; I've killed in my own time, and in my book that cain't sit too kindly with 'good man', but I don't try to do badly, if you get what I mean. I love Lyra and I wish she was my own. If I'd ever had a daughter like her - "

"Won't you?" she asked. "If you live, and go back to your homeland, and this is all over?"

Lee hardly tasted the coffee, for which he gave thanks, because it was bitter as sin. "No," he said finally. "I'm too old. I'd make some poor woman a bad husband. I gave my vows to my balloon, and, well - she's been wife and the winds mistress. Don't get me wrong. I'd have liked 'em - kids, and a wife, on a ranch in the outskirts with the dust and fake snow in the windows at winter - but it's not for me as I am, anyhow. There's some things you cain't go home to again, and some things you cain't go home to in the first place, and I'd say it's the same for you witches."

"A witch is a mother," she said, "and a lover, but never a wife."

"Have you ever been a mother, ma'am?"

For a few moments Serafina was silent, and he thought that he'd insulted her; but before apology could leave his mouth she shook her head. "I gave birth, Mr. Scoresby, but I have never been a mother. I gave him away when he was very young."

Lee did not need to ask; witches did not keep men.

"There are some things you can never go home to," she said. "There are some things you cannot regret, as a witch, and as a man."

He met her eyes; they were pale and far-away and as blue as the skies after a storm had tossed them, and for some reason the gaze bit at his entrails and he had to turn away. She was dazzling like the light off the Colorado, making him half want to shield his eyes against her glare: he downed the rest of his coffee, feeling frustrated. There was no shame in finding the queen of the witches more beautiful than any woman he'd ever met, but he was how old, damn it? Even Hester rolled over, as if to get away.

"Lee Scoresby," Serafina said. "Have I offended you?"

They both stilled at _Lee,_ as if it was unguarded caress, and he set his cup down next to his dæmon. He stood so that he could do something else with his hands, turn away from her gaze; but Serafina Pekkala was a witch-queen and about as easily turned away as an avalanche, and her fingers brushed the insides of his wrist as he had turned. He hadn't even seen her stand.

"Peace, Lee," she said: _Lee_ again, like a bell, and her touch was like holy fire. "We're allies, and we are friends."

His expression was that of a man who found his hands thrust deep into a fireplace, and for a heartbeat flicker of an instant the witch thought of Coram: and suddenly Serafina laughed, and reached up and kissed him.

* * *

Her voice was high and thin in the gulch, a long slow-soft wail that died off as if it had been cut with a knife. Her hands rolled the bitter herbs between them, until her knuckles were red from the sting. Serafina spat and made it into paste, green-brown and ugly and pungent. There were few useful plants here, and she had had to make do; she could not leave him to the elements.

 _"Earth to meat to rot to earth,  
decay, stop your stomach's yowl!  
Stop your gnawing at his eyeballs,  
stop your crawling to his skin,  
feast not, yearn not, scream not, want not,  
take him not into the ground.  
Blood, hang in the veins!  
Water, still on the tongue!  
Hold!"_

She smeared the mess down the proud bridge of his nose with her thumb; the heels of his palms, the line of his neck where the jugular had pumped. she smeared it on his mouth; she had closed his eyes long ago, and wiped it on the cool lids.

 _"Yes, his flesh came out the womb,  
yes, his flesh walked on the soil,  
yes, his flesh will return, dry-dust!  
I will give you promise, patience.  
Until then, take him not lightly!  
Be stone within the river,  
Be sand and stone and rock, unfeeding.  
Let the soil go, hungry."_

And then she was alone again. She looked at her hands, and wiped them on the black silk at her belly; and she brushed the last ants off Lee Scoresby's face, and there were no more.

* * *

It was light and sweet and passing, like a brush of a moth's wings, or a hair that falls on your forehead; but his lips stilled against hers like some malfunction and Lee kissed her back before he even remembered how to do it, mouth jolted as if her own was anbaric. How long had it been? He'd grown the mustache to impress the giggling girls at tinspoon icecream socials, when he was old enough to but too young to carry it off, too dark to do anything but look at because his grandpa was out from the Navajo tribes. Serafina smelled like no woman he'd ever kissed; something cool like mint or fennel, with a throat-tang behind it like kerosene. Cloud-pine. The sky. Lips and tongue and teeth and he knew Hester was watching holes in him; she was lighter in his arms than he thought she'd be, and skinnier, tall-boned and sure-handed as her fingers slipped into his hair. She was almost unbearably smooth and good, bourbon with bite.

"Serafina," he murmured, rough, and it was lost in her. "Serafina, this ain't the _time_ \- "

She brushed it aside as if he was an untried virgin - which, to her, he almost was - and took his mouth as if she was the man and he was the woman; hard and sweet, not letting go, all coffee and the faint bitterness of cigars that no morning rinse with salt could remove. It was more like slow argument than kissing, all mixed up, his hands at her hips as if they had been beached there and her mouth warm and insistent.

"Honey," Lee said, with her mouth measuring the distance between his lip and his ear, the stubble he hadn't quite removed without a mirror, "you're like my flag, you're my banner, I cain't _do_ this to you."

"I'm no church," she whispered in his ear. "I'm no thing to be worshipped. Respected, yes, loved, maybe feared, but I am _not_ Ruta Skadi."

"I don't worship, Sera, I don't shrive, but I carry you in my head as something pure and sweet and good and I'm sure as damn sure I'm not good enough to touch you. If you've been wanting - "

"Don't disrespect me, Mr. Scoresby." She was fierce now, proud, and he knew why men both dreaded and revered the passion of witches. "I didn't come here to seduce you. This was not mistake or intention; this is _us,_ and this is _now,_ and I am not something that can be broken by you."

The sand of the cave floor stung his skin where the hasty-thrown blanket from the hot-air balloon's basket couldn't cover, him drinking her like she was water in the desert. He never knew the puzzle of black strips of silk, and how to remove them, and swore at her until they broke into laughter and she swept them all aside. Her fingers caught Hester's fur until Kaisa came, and dropped her bill right down by the jackrabbit's ears; and then, dæmons touching, his lips went nipple to navel to knucklebone. Her fingers were too deft with the buttons of his shirt; with his belt-buckle, with his skin, spine, shoulderblades. They devoured each other's silence: unfolding like a ribbon, her calloused fingers counting his ribs, his palm against the heavy velvet of her breast until he said _Sera_ like she was some young human girl, ankles locked at the small of his back.

Their skin stuck to each other afterwards, her mouth hot oil as she kissed his pulse and sat up to push away her long fair hair. He'd only been thinking how he'd made a pretty damn good fist of it for both his age and her being half wildcat; Serafina kissed him again, and this time it was gentle.

"Serafina," he said, "you're still my flag."

"I love you all the better for being stubborn, Lee Scoresby. I think I see what Lyra must see in you."

From any other woman that would have received a hearty round of disgust; but he kissed her fingers, and reached for his rumpled trousers. Serafina watched in silence, knotting the silk around herself as if it was nothing at all; and then she pressed her hand to his cheek.

"We'll raise the wind for you to Nova Zembla," she said.

"If you insult me by telling me I need to be careful, I'll take you over my knee." When her eyebrows went somewhere up into her brow, Lee added, "Not that I wouldn't like that, mind."

"Be careful of the Church, Lee," she said, and she smiled. "I don't need to tell you to be careful of yourself."

They surprised each other by embracing once more; and he kissed her hair, which had been crushed pink in some places by the little scarlet saxifrage petals, and she left without turning back.

"Lee," Hester said, "that was the most damn fool thing you ever done."

Feeling vaguely unreal, the aëronaut knelt back down by his basket; he folded the blanket up officiously, and put it in, and went back to the hole in the weaving that needed patching. (There would be sand in it later, but Grumman wouldn't notice.) "C'mon, Hester. I think you're just sore because her dæmon there was a girl, too, and you know what they say about two girls - "

" _Lee!_ "

* * *

There was a ring of silver and blue stones on the rock beside the body, and after a moment's looking, Serafina Pekkala took it. She cupped it in her hands as if it were something alive rather than metal and turquoise; and then she put it on her finger and took her cloud-pine branch in her hand.

 _Love makes us suffer,_ she had said to Juta. Lee was not the first; he would not be the last. But it was her turn to carry his flag.

"I will go to Iorek Byrnison," she said, and she turned away from the aëronaut once more; and again, ring clutched in her fist until her knuckles were white, Serafina Pekkala did not look back.


End file.
